Author's Notes: This chapter was a bit of a challenge. Hmmm. Hope you enjoy. I'm pleased with it, at any rate.

To VA-Parky: Oooh, that makes me so happy! And thanks for revieweing on TFN! Reviews just make my day that much better. And with the raw emotions, I'm so glad to hear that, because that's what this story's all about, after all. Sorry this update wasn't quite so fast. Ah well.

To MissNaye:So it is, so it is.

To Queengoddess: He is, isn't he? The more practice I get writing him, the more I enjoy it . . . he's so EEEVIL. And very brilliant. Ah, Qui-Gon--the more I write him, the more I love him. If I don't stop writing, I'll love everyone! (the path to world peace?) Poor Obi indeed. I feel bad for him, and I'm the one writing him . . . ah, Ani. Yeah, the burns represent a significant impediment. But there's some improvement in the next chapter in that department. And of course he kissed Padme! You didn't expect him to just sit there! This is Anakin, after all.

To Eruvyweth: Yeah. Undesirable company indeed. A creepy old man in a dress--shudders--Ah, and sorry about your update problem. I guess this story is just that persistent, lol. Hey, a lot more e-mail!

To Go For It: The Frying Pan of Doom! And yeah, Jedi do the mistakes thing, don't they . . . especially Obi. Poor Obi . . . And wow, what a great compliment. I thank you. Maybe a Jedi mind trick? "Reading this story is the most important thing in your life . . . ."

To Anakin's Girl 4eva: Oh Force, I made you cry? Is it wrong to be so happy about that? Ah yes, the curse of real life. And go for it! Onasi'll need anothe round after this chapter, though.

To Quill of Molliemon: Yeah, Obi-Wan's working on the sleeping thing. And the last thing we want is an Obi convinced he's going round the twist. And poor Anakin . . . poor, poor Anakin . . . . I'd better stop or I'll start to cry again (just watched RotS . . . .) Hmmm. I think a stake through the heart might work.

Hieiko: Exactly--that way you don't have to get too close--although it does make your Jedi Master look rather askance at you. Or your sharp-tongued Jedi friend and dashing pilot buddy (in KotoR, anyway . . . .).

To Rieyeuxs: Wow. Just . . . wow. I'm so glad I was able to be responsible for such a thing (if that makes sense). I hope you continue to enjoy. And I'm loving writing it.

To Princess-Aiel: --hits Sidious with the Fying Pan of Doom, given by Go For It--Yeah, for sure.

To KTfanfic: Good to see you! Small steps forward . . . .

To SomeoneElsesDream: Glad you think so! I'm so happy! I still can't believe my writing can have that kind of effect on people, but it makes me ecstatic nonetheless. Thanks so much!

Disclaimer: The Flanneled One owns all, and you know the drill.

Chapter Fourteen

He'd always hated floating in bacta.

The fact that all he could see were blurred, far-away shapes was enough to bother him. The forced helplessness and the sluggish lethargy the healing fluid brought to his body as it knit wounds together and healed injuries only made it worse. And now he couldn't feel the Force except as a dull, far-away thrumming that throbbed with dull pain in his mind, and Anakin could feel the first stirrings of claustrophobic panic deep in his chest somewhere.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing, not that it helped much. Some bacta was being circulated through his damaged lungs at the same time as the air they provided him with, and he could taste it, slick and sour in the back of his throat. It made the pressure around him seem even worse, and it was difficult to focus. On anything, even something as simple as breathing.

He'd been fading in and out of consciousness, caught between wakefulness and dreams, and he couldn't decide which was worse, the dizzying helplessness of waking or the dark agony of his nightmares. Every time he woke it was to hanging suspended in a void of red and cyan fluid, gasping futilely for breath. He tried to focus on his anger so that he could use it to force the fear down and away, to kill the dragon that coiled restlessly inside him, but it slipped away from him and he was left as shaking and afraid as he had ever been, his insides cold and dead with withering terror.

One of the shapes outside his liquid prison came closer, looming and dark through the obscuring fluid, and Anakin flinched. His instinct was to curl away in fear, but his body didn't respond, simply convulsed with his sudden trembling.

Easy. The Force sense was familiar and calming, a soothing anchor in the maelstrom of confused emotion that seemed to be all Anakin was these days. He suddenly felt as if large, comforting hands had settled on his shoulders, steadying him gently. He suddenly felt as if he were nine again, terrified to leave home but too hopeful to stay, caught up in a world and situation that he knew nothing about. Easy. Relax. It's just Healer Risto checking your vital signs. Nothing to be frightened over. You'll be out of here soon enough.

That deep voice was so familiar, so reassuring. Anakin relaxed without even meaning to. Who—who are you? he stammered mentally.

A low chuckle. Come now, don't you remember me? A wisp of a translucent image formed in the liquid in front of him, until Anakin's straining eyes could make out long, flowing hair, a sharp beak of a nose, regal, leonine features, a beard.

Master Qui-Gon? he whispered, hardly daring to believe. What was this, some hallucination brought on by his injuries? Why now? Why Qui-Gon?

Another chuckle as the image disappeared, flowing back into the fluid it had coalesced out of. You and my former apprentice have remarkably similar thoughts on the matter for two beings so at odds with each other, came the disembodied voice.

Confusion spiraled through Anakin. But—he thought helplessly, but . . . you're dead.

It felt as if that large hand squeezed his shoulder comfortingly, though it was impossible because the touch didn't send spikes of pain shooting through him. There is no death, Anakin. There is the Force. I know you know the Code better than that.

Tendrils of nebulous, unformed guilt coiled up from his stomach, and Anakin felt vaguely ill. He hadn't fulfilled the destiny Qui-Gon had seen in him. He wasn't a Jedi, not anymore. Maybe he never really had been. Why? he whispered. I—I'm not what you wanted. I'm a Sith, not a Jedi. I . . . betrayed you.

He could almost see Qui-Gon shaking his head. Does that really matter so much at the moment? You are lost, Anakin. I came here to help you, not to cast blame.

Help me? Anakin couldn't believe it. Help him, after he had proven himself dark and powerful and merciless, after he had turned against the Jedi, destroyed the very Order that had raised and created Qui-Gon, too? Wh-why?

I believed in you once, Anakin, came the calm answer. Do you think I give up that easily?

I—Anakin didn't know what to think, or to believe.

You don't have to understand right now. Those incorporeal hands squeezed his shoulders again. Now, let go your conscious self . . . concentrate inward . . . breathe . . . .

Anakin closed his eyes and obeyed.

"Master Yoda?"

He looked up as I approached from the window he had been gazing out of, and his ears tilted upward. "Obi-Wan?" he said. "Glad I am to see you. Something troubling you, there is?"

I hesitated, uncertain how to put this. Oh, go on, Kenobi, the worst is that he'll think the stress is getting to you and you're a few components short of a lightsaber. "Ah—Master Yoda, is it possible to . . . return from the netherworld of the Force?"

His eyes narrowed. "Many things are possible, Obi-Wan. Why ask do you?"

I hesitated again. But Qui-Gon had told me to ask Yoda about the metaphysics . . . "Master Qui-Gon has . . . appeared to me through the Force." There it is; I've said it out loud. And Force does it sound stupid. Go on, just tell me I'm having hallucinations and get it over with—

Yoda's eyes grew round. "Ah, appeared to you he has?" A tiny smile appeared on his ancient, wrinkled face. "Good news, this is, Obi-Wan. Good news."

I was left to stare at him like an idiot. "G-good news?" I managed to stammer. "Master Yoda, I don't—"

A shadow of his old twinkle brightened Yoda's eyes. "Training I have for you, Obi-Wan."

"Training?" I repeated, wondering if I could possibly sound any less intelligent.

"An old friend has learned the path to immortality," he said. "One who has returned from the Netherworld of the Force—your old Master."

"Qui-Gon?" I repeated, my voice shaking with incredulous joy. I almost fell at the strength of the emotions coursing through me, emotions I couldn't lock away, couldn't ignore or deny. "Than—than it's real? I'm not . . . hallucinating? It's real?"

"Real it is," Yoda confirmed, and his gaze was gentle, even tender. "You have communed with him?"

I dropped to my knees, not only to be on a more even level with the Jedi Master but because my legs were shaking so badly I doubted they could hold me anymore. I felt as if I had been caught in strong arms the moment before I hit the ground, as if in the darkest moment of my despair someone had shone a light to show me the way. "Y-yes," I managed. "Yes, though only in my dreams." I continued staring at him blankly, my eyes blurry with elation and indescribable relief. "While I was sleeping," I clarified dazedly.

His tiny smile widened. "How to commune with him waking, I will teach you."

Anakin didn't like bacta, but he didn't mind Healer Risto. Her soft touch was like a combination of his mom and Padmé, and she smelled clean and nice, like Alderaanian t'il blossoms. He wondered if she wore perfume, like Padmé did. She supported him without making him feel weak and pathetic somehow as she helped him out of the bacta tank, wiping up the cool, goopy liquid as it dripped off him and pooled around his feet, her hands sure and gentle as she ran a sheet of absorbent fabric over his face, his chest, back through his hair, and he didn't feel like a cripple as she helped him back to the bed. His mind was fuzzy and blank, but he was aware of that much as if it were coming from very, very far away. She murmured softly to him all the while, and he was comforted and so much more relaxed than he had been, as if somehow being in the bacta tank had spread peace and reassurance throughout his entire body. Anakin thought there was something he should remember about his time in the tank, something that had happened, but it slipped away from him even as he reached for it and he was too bleary and limp to pursue it. Healer Risto didn't hook him back up the respirator, either, and Anakin was glad. He had hated that thing . . . .

He came back to consciousness sometime later with a feeling of wrongness, of sharpness, as if the Force had been broken and the serrated edges were pushing up against the edges of his mind. Anakin moaned and shook his head in protest, trying to free himself of the uncomfortable sensation on the inside of his skull.

Instead, it just came into sharper focus, redefining itself not as broken Force but as an uncomfortably sharp, unwelcome but vaguely familiar presence. Anakin bit his lip against another moan and looked up into the blazing blue eyes of the man who had told him that Padmé was dying.

The man's lips curved in a wry, twisted sort of smile. "How are we feeling today, Chosen One?" he sneered. "Enjoy your dip in the bacta tank?" Something in the expression on his face told Anakin that this man knew how much he hated bacta treatments.

"Leave me alone," Anakin mumbled. He didn't want this. He didn't want this man to dredge up the darkness again, scrape it against the shards of a heart still raw and bleeding. He just wanted to sleep, not think, not feel, just sleep and see if some of the broken parts of Anakin Skywalker might tumble back together from inside the shell of Vader.

"Oh, poor baby," the man shot back. "Leave you alone? Like you left the Jedi alone? The Separatists? How many of the children cried as you hacked them to pieces, scum? How many of the aliens begged for mercy?"

Images of darkness and death, his saber flashing through innocents and guilty alike, swam in front of Anakin's eyes, and he swallowed the growing lump of carbonite in his throat with an effort. It thudded, cold and hard and nauseating, into his stomach.

They had deserved to die. They had had to die. He had had no choice.

But the tears of the children still swam in his head, their screams echoed in his ears.

He had done what no other had the strength to do. He had saved the Republic. He had saved his Empire.

His eyes narrowed as he stared at the man. Slowly, unsteadily, he pushed himself up on his good arm. "What . . . do you . . . want?" The question was coherent this time, even if his words were slow and every one of them took a tremendous effort.

The blow to his face was like being hit with a cargo lifter. The shock knocked him back onto the bed and set his ears ringing. Anakin caught himself somehow with a hand on the edge of the bed before he tumbled off it and lay there, gasping. His teeth had bitten deep into his lip at the force of the blow, and he could feel blood trickling slowly out of his mouth, down his cheek. Anger ignited within him like a lightsaber blade at the knowledge that there was no way for him to wipe the blood away in his relatively helpless state.

The man seemed not to have heard him. "You did this," he said raggedly, and his eyes were filled with tears. "Haven't you seen Kenobi staggering around like a lost soul? His eyes fill with unshed tears every time he sits by your bedside and looks at your wounds. Master Yoda has aged centuries in a few days. General Organa looks at me as if there is something broken and bleeding inside him. Senator Amidala—Senator Amidala is pale and ashen, like death already, and she sobs when she thinks of you. Don't you see what you've done? You are a monster! You have destroyed a thousand years of justice and democracy, and for what?"

He hit Anakin again, an open-handed slap across his face. The man's words had momentarily stunned and dazed him, made his heart wrench and bleed and ache, but the physical pain brought him back to Gardulla and Watto, and he was not going to be pushed down anymore or pulled like a grass-cub between three Corellian sand-panthers. Now he had the power to push back. And Sidious had given him permission. "Leave me ALONE!" he roared. The Force surged around him, and it caught the man and slammed him back against the wall. He crumpled and fell in a limp heap to the floor.

Anakin collapsed on the bed. He could feel the tears well up and slip down his cheeks, feel his chin trembling, the hot prickling of more tears, the carbonite back in his throat. "J-just l-leave me alone," he whispered, the words catching on a sobbing breath. He didn't want to cry anymore, but he couldn't seem to stop himself.

And he had the feeling that a Sith Lord shouldn't cry.

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